October 16, 2007

If You Start Me Up, I'll Never Stop

A few days ago I swallowed a battery. Just a little one, mind you. How? That morning I had tucked some ADD med and a cramp pill in the back pocket of my jeans. I won't lie. I was cramping like mean ol' bitch and half-crazy with some ADD symptoms.

I had forgotten that earlier I had also slipped a tiny Tirefly battery into my back pocket, because, nifty though Tireflys are (I wrote about them possibly contributing to my gradual blindness here), one of mine must have a malfunctioning "shut off light when tire stops moving" function, which I attempted to remedy with a quick unscrewing of the top, removal of one battery, and temporarily relocating it in the back pocket of my jeans.

Later that day, bouncing along on the CTA, the cramps and the ADD kicked in at the same time, so, eyes fixed firmly to the middle pages of "Mostly Harmless," I reached into my back pocket, grabbed its contents, slapped them into my yaw, and took a big chug of bottled water.

It's weird, because as the assortment of pills and non-edible items shifted around on my tongue, some vaguely alert part of my brain pinged, and thought, "oh, wait, wait, don't! That's not a pill!" But an ancient, and much dumber part of my brain, responsible for eating and swallowing anything with even a smidgen of nutritional value, got all excited and happy and thought "oh...something smooth and pretty on the tongue -- yum yum DUH eat DUH," and down the gullet it went.

It was kind of like that moment of conflict in your brain when you realize you're locking yourself out of your car or your house: you're looking at your hand, you know you're doing something wrong, and there actually is time to stop it from happening, but you do it anyway.

Before you ask the gross obvious question, no, I haven't been mashing my poo to make sure the battery has completed its voyage through my digestive cycle. But I have been feeling a little extra perky lately. Who says all of our energy should come from traditional food sources?